The investor has a stake in the company, so they share in the successes and take on the risk of failure, but they provide capital to make this purchase from the parent company in the first place.
How long until you get out of the section with mimic enemies? Because when that game launched, that was all I saw in footage of the opening hours, and I wasn’t interested in that.
The enemies ignored both of them. Allegedly, anyway. I know when I played The Last of Us at launch, there were times that enemies saw me when I thought I was perfectly hidden while Ellie was out in the middle of no man’s land. In both cases, the enemy AI ignored these other characters because A) escort missions have never been fun, and B) it slowly builds a reason for you, the player, to grow attached to these characters when they help you. You feel the resource deficit in Infinite when Ellie’s not there to throw them to you. Both games did basically come up with the same gimmick in the same year.
I wasn’t cheering for subscription services. I was cheering that this exclusivity model of walled gardens no longer makes economic sense, while open platforms are on the rise. Microsoft is hoping that their pivot will result in more subscribers to their subscription service, but all signs are pointing to them having a rough time of growing beyond where they stand now, for all sorts of reasons.
It’s a play for the consumer’s money, and when the consumer has better options than the traditional console model, the console model breaks down. They’ve got at least one more Xbox in them, whether or not that next Xbox is just a PC with different branding.
I’m really excited to hear that the narrative Lego concept is working. It makes a lot of sense on paper, but there are a lot of ways it could go wrong. We won’t really know until the game is out, but this could potentially be revolutionary for the medium, both from the customer’s side and the business side of things.
You may as well say the same thing about DRM-free games then, since this is effectively just a gimmick to disguise DRM. You don’t provide the server to endorse piracy. You do it because anything less is giving your customer an inferior product. Even if the preservation aspect of this didn’t upset me, I’d still have a hard time buying a game like Helldivers 2 because it comes across as phenomenally poor value compared to buying a game that’s built to last.
If people can run pirate MMO servers, then they can run private Helldivers 2 servers. It’s very conveniently impractical for private servers to be distributed when the game has microtransaction revenue streams, because private servers would inevitably provide opportunities to sidestep them. They’d still make plenty of money though, because most people would choose to play on official servers regardless, but they see it as a threat to their business model, which is why they don’t do it.
It still stands in the way of preservation, and it’s not good enough to release private servers after the game is sunset, because there’s no guarantee while the game is still supported that it’s going to happen to keep the game alive. Plus, even in a best case scenario, private servers are necessary to get around server downtime, DDOS attacks, queues when the servers are at capacity, or just the ability to play with some friends if you’re in a cabin in the woods.